Thursday, February 25, 2010
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Few surprises in Virginia's big game hunting results
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Hunters in Virginia established record deer and bear kills during the 2009-10 season, but the tally was so close to the previous season no one is doing a lot of whooping.
The deer kill was a record 256,512, less than one percent above the previous year, according to figures released this week by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
The bear kill was a record 2,304, an increase of 4.5 percent over the previous season. It could have been much higher in the wake of new regulations that encouraged firearm, muzzleloader and archery hunters to kill more bears for population control. Hunter success fell toward the end of the season when it was impacted by a poor mast crop and harsh weather that included snowstorms.
There is not much to shout about over the fall turkey season, which saw a disappointing 3,538 birds reported, just 1 percent ahead of the previous season. A year ago I reported that the 2008-09 fall kill represented a 26 percent drop over the previous season and you would have to go back more than 20 years to find anything lower. Are we closing in on a time when the bear kill will be bigger than the fall turkey kill?
Here is a more detailed look at the big game results:
DEER
Hunters tend to get more excited about record deer kills than do wildlife biologists who often view them as a population pressing beyond its biological and cultural bounds.
This record, however, is a modest 130 animals above the previous season, not a major cause for joy or concern. Fact is, female deer represented a whopping 49 percent of the take -- a record 124,477 animals, 2 percent more than the previous season. Efforts to kill more antlerless deer in order to maintain a balanced herd appear to be working well, since this is the seventh consecutive season of a record doe kill.
Antlered bucks accounted for 108,443 deer in the kill and button bucks 23,592.
Hunters using bows, crossbow and muzzleloader all saw modest declines in their success for reasons I can’t explain, unless they were dedicating some of their time to bear hunting rather than deer hunting. The bow kill was 16,947, down 6 percent; crossbow 9,456, down 2 percent and muzzleloader, 55,900 down 2 percent. Even so, the muzzleloader take represented nearly one-quarter of the total kill.
The southern areas of the state tended to produce an increased kill while the northern sections registered a decline and the tidewater area remained the same.
There was a major increase in the use of the Internet and phone to report deer kills, 66 percent compared to 44 percent the previous season.
BEAR
No telling how high the bear kill might have gone had things not turned sour near the end of the season. Biologists believe that a poor mast crop caused bears to den earlier and become less vulnerable to hunters during the late season. Add to that, the adverse effect on hunting caused by frigid weather and significant snow that hit large areas of Virginia in mid-December and hung around well past the season’s end in early January.
You can see the impact of the late-season food/weather factors by looking at the progression of the seasons. Bowhunters killed 1,017, or 44-percent of the total, nearly twice the take of the previous season. That isn’t likely to make hound hunters happy. Muzzleloaders accounted for 356 bears compared to 95 taken the previous season. The firearm’s season produced 931 reported kills, or 40 percent of the total, but that was well under the 1,592 of the previous season. Hound hunters accounted for 48 percent of the firearm kills, one percent more than the previous season.
Virginia’s bear population has been increasing at the average rate of approximately 9 percent a year, which means the recent season didn’t cut into the population. Female bears composed 42 percent of the kill, a number consistent with an expanding population.
TURKEY
The disappointing turkey kill came during a time of poor food conditions, which normally increases the kill since turkeys must widen their range to survive, thus exposing themselves to hunters.
But the real culprit here, biologists will tell you, is an uncanny string of poor production years which have kept the population form expanding. No one seems to have the answer as to what is happening.
Recruitment isn’t likely to improve this year, what with a harsh winter that has created a long-lasting snow pack in the western portion of the state.
“Some mortality from the snow can be expected,” said Gary Norman, a DGIF biologist who has kept track of turkeys for a number of years. “However, when we had radios on birds during the last big storm here -- 30-plus inches -- we didn’t lose any birds. They tend to go to cedar thickets and spring seeps.”
A tough winter could mean that turkeys won’t have as much vigor for the reproduction process this spring.
Some hunters will tell you that turkeys aren’t as scarce as the fall kill figures suggest; that, the low, stable kill is the result of over restrictive regulations and fewer hunters participating in the autumn/winter season.
Hunter success was heaviest on the front end of the season, with 47 percent of the kill reported the first two weeks of the six-week season. Twelve percent came on Thanksgiving Day.
Fall turkey hunting has become pretty much a private land pursuit, with only 6 percent of the birds coming from national forest land and 2 percent from state-owned land.
